In this paper we analyse to what extent the Nordic economies are vulnerable to external shocks. Specifi cally, we assess the conventional wisdom that the Nordic countries are small open economies that are sig nificantly engaged in international trade, specialised in only few specific industries...

We analyse common stylized facts of services firms engaged in trade in a comparative study across four EU member countries. We find that, though relatively less engaged in trade than manufacturing firms, services firms have similar traits. Services firms are more likely to import than to export....

We establish a set of stylised facts for trade and trading firms in five market services sectors using comparable firm-level and services data from four EU countries. Our analysis shows that exports account for much lower shares of overall sales in the services sectors than in manufacturing. In...

In this paper, we study the value chain of a Finnish designed bicycle and how the value added of the product is spread through the value chain in three distinct cases. In the first case the bicycle is manufactured in Finland by the researched company. In the two other cases the manufacturing of...

We analyse the degree of EU countries’ specialisation in their exports and manufacturing value added using the Herfindahl-Hirschmann index and the degree of structural similarity using the similarity index developed by Finger and Kreinin (1979). We also analyse the convergence of GDP growth...

Recently a small and growing empirical literature has attempted to analyze the role that quality plays in our understanding of trade. In particular, the recent work of Khandelwal (2010) has brought the insights of structural IO models of demand to bear into trade data. Our work builds on this...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...

In this paper, we study how firm-level export performance is affected by Real Exchange Rate (RER) volatility and investigate the way this effect is shaped by firm size and more specifically, the number of destinations. Our empirical analysis relies on a French firm-level database that combines...

This work investigates the motivations behind the Chinese fiscal policy on exports. It relies on very detailed product level (HS 6 digit) data over the period 2002-12 covering both export tax and export VAT rebate. It aims to uncover the respective importance of the various policy motivations...